ALFRED'S BEST OF THE BLOGOSPHERE
...aaaand we're back.
This week's installment is dedicated to the Missouri State University Library's Interlibrary Loan department, for tracking down this bitterly obscure, self-published-on-a-copier set of Civil War letters I was looking for.
On to the links...
There's a lot of loose talk going around about Taj Mahal having a "fatally fundamentally flawed" card system. This initially struck me as odd, as Taj Mahal doesn't really have a card system--it's really money printed on cards rather than "cards" in the sense that, say, Web of Power has cards. The poker metaphor kind of lost me. Anyway, what strikes me--reading the pro and con arguments on there--are two things:
- First, it's perfectly true that an inexperienced player acts as an unbalancing bull in the china shop in a game with four experienced players. This is, far and away, my biggest problem with the game and is what's making me lean towards downgrading it to a 9 on my 'Geek ratings and moving Amun-Re up to the 10 spot (I have three 10s--my favorite wargame, my favorite "classic," and my favorite "Euro"). Against other experienced, alert gamers, though, it's still a huge favorite.
- In games with experienced players, though, I've (seriously) never been "forced into a fight" I didn't want or expect. Frankly, I believe that the bidding is the least important aspect of the game, and among skilled players the real heart of the game is in planning your strategy from the first couple of provinces, reading other players' preferences, and amassing and spending money in such a way that your money and what you want come together at the right time--namely, when either nobody wants what you want, or you know that you have the guns to get it. Bidding should (almost) never come as a surprise to you.
It's hard to argue with Yehuda's guideposts for blog success. And it is a spiffy die logo. It's hard to tell, but I've actually done some surgery over the life of the blog to the standard template, if only to get the @#%! HTML to work right. Maybe one day I'll do my own.
Some of the Lumbersmiths folks played a game of Die Macher the other day, and, from what one can tell, it made quite and impression. Especially note the last link there, about when and whether to hose people. There are a fair number of games where it's fairly likely that you'll have to screw someone early in the game for, essentially, no reason. Citadels leaps to mind here. Settlers has that to a certain extent, which is why all civilized people play with the "no robber the first two turns" house rule--it minimizes, if not eliminates, the problem.
I've been curious about Kreta for a while; it was good to see a review in Austin Boardgamer.
Over on Gone Gaming, we've had some discussion about the wisdom of having lots of games. I guess I should lend something of an expert opinion (as I finally cracked four digits in the past week on my BGG collection). I guess my theory is that I like to be able to match games with any plausible combination of moods and players for the Euros, and for wargames I'm intrigued by the difficulties involved in modelling historical situations and like to study them for that sake, if nothing else. (Although I do have a tendency to pare down games on a certain subject--say, the Napoleonic Wars--if there's a One True Game, for me, that comes out.) As with many collections, I think, twenty percent of the games end up getting eighty percent of my play. I can see, though, the attraction in radically paring down to just a few core interests--Bridge, or Go, or just ten or twelve Euros--but I don't see that happening, if only from an attention-span viewpoint.
Tom Vasel has put a lot of thought into game variants he'd like to see. More than I have, certainly; for me, I'm content waiting for some of the Alhambra expansions in English...but what I really want are some new Ambush! expansions.
Lotta Ticket to Ride variant boards coming out, which I find interesting. Naturelich seems to be a good place to find out about such things--lots and lots of variant posts on many different games--start with this one of Austria. I like that there are a lot of Carcassonne variants, too. I'm working on a re-do inspired by the game that may or may not ever see the light of day.
What would a flyer describing, to the uninitiated, what These Games of Ours are all about? Check out this prototype.
Keep up the good posts, everybody!
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